When the Skagosi Came South
by TheAlderHollow
Summary: A series of one-shots that capture different moments in time after The Siege of Winterfell. The Skagosi decide to raid southward to escape advancing Others, find warmer pastures and food...and to do it under the Stark banner. They have taken as a figurehead to rally to a mysterious and very young boy, who rides atop a direwolf with obsidian black fur...(Rickon X Shireen)
1. Rogar Snow

The howl that came spinning and winding off the rock faces and through the white and brown painted tree growth was angry and deep and young. The blue sky almost seemed to glow fiercer because of the rage in that voice.

The rock faces had hair of frozen white water, and the trees were half buried under the snow.

Rogar didn't glance back. Nor any of the column that marched behind him. They hadn't for days. The howls were always there, constant and numbingly painful like the blown snow that stabbed at their faces.

When one vicious gust forced his face to turn aside, he saw his shrinking men: shrinking in numbers, shrinking in flesh. The only bulk that remained to them now were the brown and white layers of small clothes and leather and wool and bellowing cloaks. A 100 or so remained now, of the 400 that had fled from the holdfast on the upper Weeping Water.

Rogar Snow was not a man to truly lead. It took a bastard of great talent to earn a place of command on the march, even in the North. He did not have true talent. He was only a castellan, and the only things about him that were true was the way in which he could be expected to rise before sunset every morning and begin his long circuit of duties: observe the changing of guard, inspect the readiness of armor and arms and soldiers, the stables, see to the food stores and meals of the day. And now the only thing he knew for true was that he had to, he _was_, putting one foot in front of the other. He had numb feet and numb legs and a numb mind.

Rogar didn't curse where he was now, leading men he had no business commanding outside castle walls. It was too cold to curse, too cold to march, but mostly just too damn cold.

All of Bolton's petty sworn lords were most likely dead by now. The only thing he was half certain of was that Stannis and the clans won at Winterfell. Three weeks later the Skags had appeared, taken the Dreadfort and then pounced on Rogar's holdfast, and slaughtered the ones who weren't quick enough or lucky enough to escape. He had listened to them cheering and screaming and even smelled the pork they were cooking on their fires from the moors nearby. The thing was, most of the provisions had already been taken, eaten or destroyed, especially the pork. He had seen bright fires burning, their glow heaving like swollen bellies in the dark. Rogar's men said that the Young Wolf's shade had come back, and his direwolf with him, his fur burned black from his time in hell.

They had received no ravens, and none of theirs would fly. When the stolid castellan had tried to send one last raven to White Harbor with a message to beg for the worshippers of the Seven for mercy and protection against the savages, the ravens had simply fluttered to an oak bough and given a mocking quark. "Brandon, Brandon," it had laughed. "King, King." The eyes in the weirwoods shadowed the column as they passed. Their expressions had always been ferocious or sad, but of late Rogar felt new life in them_. _He swore that the lines of their faces _moved._

The morning after the raven had refused to fly, the armorer and second command was found on his own sword.

He wondered why the howling creatures were taking so long to catch them. They'd been marching two weeks now, and they were always near behind them. Were their sacks loaded with fresh meat? Was it fun for the savages now? Rogar now kept going for only one reason: he wouldn't be a shit pile left by some Skag in the snow.

_Snow left in the snow. _The thought almost made him laugh, but it caught in the back of his mouth and he choked.

Then there was another howl, coming from the creature and the wind through the rocky passes. _The creature was closer now._


	2. The Scout and the Laughing Face

_A part of a series of one-shots about the Skagosi's campaign southward, throwing the lot in with the Starks in hopes of escaping the Others and starvation. Connected to "Running from the Skagosi." Their rally point is a boy who claims to Rickon Stark and rides atop a savage black direwolf. _

_I'm worried about the flow of action in this piece, so if any of you have any feedback to help me, it would be appreciated!_

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><p>Torig barely heard his own footsteps as he padded through the grey-green pillars, passing under tresses of the pine branches and through the slanted light of the low winter sun at his back. The day before a freezing rain had fused the upper snowpack into a snow back, and then after came a dry dusting, so that they did not need their bear-paws to walk, the contraptions of wood and hide they would wear on their feet to keep from sinking into the snow, now so high it could swallow a man without a trace.<p>

There was the faint figure of the square stone giant across the Last River, black and obscure against the farther horizon. Even from this half-mile away, he could tell it covered twice as many acres as the seat of his lords, the Crowls. The woman called Osha had said that these were nothing more than minor outposts. Winterfell made them all look like saplings.

He prayed that a human cry wouldn't carry over the lightly wooded plain between the fortress and the river.

Torig looked to his right and several feet away saw a weirwood, thicker than a boulder and taller than a watchtower, whose face rested above the snow-line. Its expression was fixed on the sixteen-year old, smiling but with tears and drool of red sap.

Not many weirwood happy expressions. He had counted three in his whole that he had seen with laughs or smiles. Since he and his clan had passed over sailed the waters and walked over the ice from Skagos, he had counted 12. Maybe it was madness, but the faces were changing. To see that undying, sentient gaze meeting him, Torig felt strangely reassured and strangely unnerved.

_Was The King of Winter watching him at that very moment, weighing him as a warrior and a man? _He was said to be only a boy himself who could not walk on his own two legs but could hunt with a dozen set of paws, fly on a hundred pairs of wings, and see with a thousand eyes. _More tree than man. More god than king._

He decided that would be the tree where he would make his offering.

Torig crouched a little lower and lowered his hood down to expose his flat mohawk, (soaked in quicklime to make it always slip from an enemies' grasp) and pointed his dragonglass spear forward, keeping his stance wide, his strides careful and long as he approached the bank of the river. His husky dog padded behind him.

The delta of the Last River dipped down slightly from the forest, marking where the floods of spring had worn away the earth layer by layer.

On the ice, a man was sitting on a wood stump, fish-pole in hand and a line down through a hole carved in the ice.

Torig took cover behind an oak, pulling his husky with him. He scratched the animal behind the ear, leaned against the trunk, and slipped out from his own skin and into the darkness.

The next sensation he had was the smell of his human body; a powerful odor of frozen sweat, bits of gore and blood from past kills and past feasts. When he could see, what he saw was his human skin against the tree tunk, eyes open, white, vacant.

Torig pawed from behind the tree and toward the riverbank, toward the stranger fishing on the ice.

The man wore brown and grey furs and black leather feet. When Torig slid onto the ice he barked lowly, trying to sound friendly. The stranger looked up and was still and quiet for a moment. His head was hooded, his expression vacant and unfeeling.

He barked again, wagging his tail. The man picked up a long blade and thrust it at the dog, as a warning. Torgig recoiled, strafing horizontally across the rough surface of the ice, then jumped forward to grab a fish from man's basket. Jumping back, he narrowly avoided a chop of the blade across his forehead.

He turned and ran back to the trees, and heard the heavy thuds of running boots. Torig slipped back to his own skin, still leaning against the oak's trunk.

_The man wore a badge with a pink man on it. The mark of The Bolton._

He took a deep desperate breath. He had killed twice before, but never alone without his cousins or aunts or uncles to stand with him.

This was different.

The black leather boots were crunching the snow, following after curses carried over the frozen air.

He stood up and gripped the shaft of his spear tight in his right hand. The man was still chasing the husky. He waited several moments, letting the pair get closer and closer.

Torig jumped from his cover, feet in stance and spear raised. For a moment, the man's bearded face said nothing, but the spark of realization appeared in his eyes he tried to slide into a stop, nearly falling backward.

Torig stepped forward into the throw, hurdling the spear with all the strength in his upper body. The flayed man leaned to the side but not quickly enough. Instead of in his get, the obsidian point lodged deep into his thigh.

His cried out, haggard and croaking, falling on both knees. By this time the dog had dropped the fish and swung to behind its enemy, snapping and barking.

Torig pulled his log hook and hatchet from his belt. As he approached, The Bolton's servant swung his sword wildly, growling and grunting with short and shallow breaths.

He stayed back for a few moments, his heartbeat hammering but his eyes focused like an arrowhead. In the back of his mind, he exalted, knowing that he had won. It was a familiar feeling, like when he skinchanged his husky to bite the throat of a baby doe or a goat.

The man whirled his blade out again, slowly and awkwardly, and with a quick strike Torig chopped at his wrist. Blood splashed out into the snow, the man screamed again as his hand clung to his arm by only a few tendrils of flesh. In the next motion, Torig brought his log hook up and behind him, and then swung it with all the strength his body to bring the point under the man's chin. The rusted iron point plunged up through the mouth and into the bony top shelf like a battering ram through wood.

After removing the spear, he let the man fall and then started to drag him over the thinner snow of the river's delta, down the tree line. The man's dying cries came out gurgling on blood and gore, with the tongue impaled. His mind had shut down and what still had conscious thought all was focused on the task that remained.

When Torig reached the weirwood, he was eye level with that laughing face. He hauled the man's limp body up to his knees, yanked out the log hook and then wrapped an arm under the wound to staunch blood and expose the neck.

Above them in the frigid breezes shuddering the branches, a murder of ravens had gathered and were squawking madly, loudly, and with what Torig thought was almost a human tone of….victory. Celebration.

They perched on the thick low branches as he removed a bronze sickle from his belt and laid it over the man's throat.

A vow of respect to the Old Gods of the forest fell from his lips, before he pulled sharply on the sickle. Blood gushed like water from a broken damn on the pale bark. When the gushing slowed, he lifted the body up and laid it over a branch. The young warrior cut off the man's hand, wrapped it on cloth and stuffed it in his satchel. As he stepped away the ravens swarmed on the corpse and tore at the flesh.

The hand would be proof to his clan. He would be greeted at camp as a man and a keeper of the Pact.

Before he retreated back into the forest, the young man turned to look one more time at the holdfast and thought about what awaited its godswood come the night when his people would cross the Last River. Osha claimed that the flayed men where totally unaware of what was approaching their walls. None of their ravens ever reached The Bolton, and none of his reached them.

It wouldn't be much longer now.


	3. You'll Be Queen of the Haunted Forest

_Rickon x Shireen Fluff._

_Also a part of a series of snap-shots about the Skagosi campaign south to Winterfell, where Bran, the King of Winter, awaits them. They are not far from Winterfell now.  
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_The Starks have been aged up. Rickon is 10-11, and Shireen is about 14-15._

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><p>"Prince Rickon," she thought out-loud suddenly, "My father and Maester Cressen always said it hurts a man to ride without a saddle."<p>

"We aren't going fast," he answered and he sounded like he understood, but didn't care, "When Shaggy goes into a gallop I lay on my stomach more."

Shireen couldn't quite believe that he had ever managed to put reins on the beast; not ones in its mouth mind you, but by a tie around the neck and chest.

She sat in front of him, with his great fur cape wrapped over her like a blanket, one of his arms around her waist to hold her against him closely. If he was embarrassed or nervous, his voice didn't show it.

"I'll make you Queen of the Haunted Forest and Skagos," he started, very assured, "when the war is over and all the White Walkers are dead. We can be free like Osha there, and do what we want."

He patted the direwolf's fur rough and hard.

"The wildlings don't like me, my prince," she shivered out, even though she felt strangely warm despite the slow and steady winter wind, its currents breaking and changing direction around the trunks of the trees.

"That's not my name. I'm Rickon," he commanded.

"But you're brother is a king. That makes you a prince," Shireen affirmed, very proper.

"The Onion Knight likes to call me that. But I know you. You should call me Rickon."

She wanted to remind him that Lord Davos was more than just a knight. He had actually been a King's Hand, but Rickon had ignored titles like the rest of the wild people unless you were the head of a House or married to one. Lord Crowl was "The Crowl" and Lord Skane, "The Skane" and so on, and they called King Bran "The King of Winter" or "The Brandon." Every one else went by a nickname or a first name. Sometimes they whispered that Rickon was "The Savage Wolf."

"You still call me 'princess' sometimes," she defended.

"You're southron. It's different. And your father was a king."

"He was a king," Shireen remembered aloud and her head dipped down.

"They killed my father, too," Rickon said in a fierce voice, "But me and Bran and Arya, we all have wolves. My brother can find the Boltons and the Freys and Lannisters and our wolves will eat them. Jon has a wolf, too." And then he went back to the subject before: "Shaggy and I would make the wildlings like you," he affirmed, "Shaggy likes you as almost much as I do."

The direwolf yawned and whined at once, agreeing.

Roose Bolton, being broken in half in the jaws of a black shadow shaped like direwolf. The thought was…strange. Comforting? Disturbing? Shireen couldn't tell, but the image stuck and would not leave her.

"Or the Wolfswood? Or one of the other woods? Lots of my fathers' men are dead or old. My brother would give me one of their castles."

Shireen, pull his cloak tighter around her, looked down the endless rows of grey and brown, gnarled trees, some thin and bent, others thick and split, like the pillars of a white-floored cavern that went on for eternity. It would be green again in spring. She did like something about it, out here almost alone with just Rickon, excepting the guard of warriors following a ways behind them on garrons with long manes and thick hair. It felt less alone and less sad than her damp room in Dragonstone, even with all its books. Patchface was long lost to her.

She thought about all the tales she had heard about the Starks, at Dragonstone and in the Castle Black's library: stories about cold men and cold women with dull granite eyes, wearing furs and mail, who turned into wolves and ate their enemies; sorcerers who could speak with ravens and consorted with Children of the Forest. A hundred tales, few of which were about romance and enchantment, and many about war and magic…and white trees with fearful faces.

Shireen turned to look at Rickon in the face, he a whole head taller than her though he was her junior by 5 years. He didn't look his ancestors: His hair was long and unruly under his hood, yes, but dirty dark brown, it was rich auburn, and his eyes were like two pieces of bright blue sky honed to sharpness, a paler shade than her own. They stabbed here and then there like a spear, burning with…something. Shireen wasn't sure if it was anger or desperation or sadness or fear or all of those things together.

She was surprised about how true the histories had been.

But it felt strangely warm and safe, next to the fur of a direwolf. It was a wild beast yes, but it was her beast.


	4. Pass the Sentence

_Another snapshot of the Skagosi campaign, about middway to Winterfell._

_This is an AU where many northerners have Inuit features, (if I was writing about the Reach, I would probably make the Tyrells and many other Reachmen black. Somehow it just feels right to me; with Summer Islanders having settled into the Reach in exchange for show the First Men how to grow orchards and fruits.)  
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_And the Starks have been aged up a few years: Rickon is 10, Bran is 13, Ayra is 15, Sansa is 17, and Jon 20, as was Robb._

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><p>Now that was a creature: its steps were heavy and sloppy, its head leaning from one side to the other. When one of the spearwives was a little too far out from the parted mass, its jaws snapped forward at the air, and she jumped back. An angry creature, looking for a reason to be mean. It was muscled in an ungainly way, more like a mammoth or a lion than a wolf.<p>

The boy less rode the direwolf then simply floated atop it, holding on by a fistful of fur in one hand a small weirwood and bronze spear that had been barely blooded in the other. His hair was big, and long. They said he wouldn't let a blade near it but that he let it, not even the woman named Osha, but he did let them braid it: two strands over the top of his head coming into one larger one down his neck and over his shoulder, bright auburn despite its unwashed greasiness. He wore a hide jerkin, thick grey wolf beneath, and tight cape of grey fur: probably a wolf's.

He was only 10 years old, but to look into his eyes made Harra afraid.

_They shouldn't let boys that young warg animals like that. _She wondered though: had the wolf made the boy savage, or the other way around?

He might let the direwolf eat someone that stepped a little close. It had happened before. Only the Osha woman was truly safe around them, and the cursed little girl he'd taken a fancy too, riding behind him and her hands on his shoulders.

Harra couldn't imagine what the boy saw in her: She was some four years older at four-and-ten and even so was somehow smaller, and was plain by the standard of both Skagosi and Free Folk. Her eyes were wide-set, her ears were huge, and her head shaped in like a somewhat squished square. Her skin was unnaturally white, likely from the days spent in whatever tower they had locked her in

None of that actually mattered to Skagosi: affection was affection and what did looks matter on a dark and cold winter night?

But she was unclean; marked with the greyscale from neck to nearly the peek of her checkbone.

The Magnar, the Crowl and the Skane had approached the Onion Knight and Osha to demand the girl be put down. She laughed and had said that if any of them wished to be a direwolf's shit pile in the snow, they were welcome to try. Assuming they survived that, they find that the King of Winter's ravens would vanish. No more guides, no more aid, no more messages.

"Make no mistake," the wildling warned them, "You're only as valuable to the King o' Winter as his brother's life, and he'll die before he lets you touch that girl."

Not that mattered really, as the girl was never far from the boy, and the boy never far from the direwolf, and none of the Skagosi got too close to the direwolf.

The sky hung low and grey that day, and the air was calm.

Harra and the others of a warrior guard marching a minimum ten feet from the beast, used their weirwood and bronze spears to push aside the reeking, hoar-frosted mass in the godswood of the holdfast: the last one before they would pass over the moors east of the Dreadfort.

Harra thought about that often: A people who'd named their castle the Dreadfort and wore the skins of their dead enemies had been made to bow the Starks; since she was little she'd wondered what that said about Starks. Looking at the little boy and his humungous, well-fed direwolf, she knew. And she knew it from the ravens the circled in the sky above them, and smiling faces of the weirwoods.

Harra herself, like many of the free folk, and northern kneelers had warm acorn-colored skin, shiny black hair, a round face and full cheeks, short with a blocky torso, and eyes colored like wet earth.

Under the pine branches and hardwood boughs, the dead men had been piled and stripped bare.

One still alive had been forced to his knees in front of the heart tree, facing the Stark prince loping toward him on a beast-of-prey as if it were a horse. It had eaten horses in fact. And humans.

The captive was dressed in finer clothes than them all: clean black leather instead of hide, fur and leather boots instead of wraps and snow shoes, a thin silver chain around his neck rather than a bronze brooch to pin the cape together. His face was flat and rectangular, his nose small, thin and long. On his shirt was sewn the badge of the flayed man, red on pink. Even though there were long bangs over his tanned face, she could still make out the expression; anger, contempt, even a bit of fear.

The beast stopped and a moment passed while he and Osha helped the girl down. He did so putting his arms under shoulders with surprising gentleness and soft expression, while Osha held her by the waist and then let her stand in the snow. The boy stayed atop the creature.

"My father said that the man who passed the sentence should swing the sword," he called out, and his voice was high and raspy from breathing in cold, cold air, and his skin was starting to turn greyer and blotchier from the icy touch.

Harra was close enough to hear Osha whisper, "You can't swing a sword, little lord."

"I know that, Auntie!" he snapped, but was not truly angry.

The captive ignored it all, and began to spit out with twisted, bitter look, "I had heard about your brothers, Rickon Stark; about Robb, and how he caught Stafford Lannister and his army by surprise with an army of wargs, but men talk. But here you are, with the mark of the beast clearly on you."

A voice yelled out from the crowd in the Old Tongue, "Only needed a few wargs take your bloody arse down."

Harra and the rest laughed. The warg boy only had the smallest, absent-minded smile.

"Lord Bolton will have two kinds of skin to wear then. The ravens left long ago-"

"Yes, the Dreadfort and to the Lonely Hills, and to the one at the mouth of the Weeping Water. Your words to them were very courteous and pleading, like a good southron lord. 'The savages have been spotted in the woods outside our walls, attack expected soon'? I remember it right," Osha broke in, and she spoke calm and steady.

The captive gaped.

"Lord Garwin, you have committed treason twice over against your liege, first King Robb, and then his brother King Bran," spoke the Onion Knight, and he sounded like he was in great pain, as if they were grinding his teeth down as they left his mouth, "Treason has only punishment: death. If Prince Rickon was merciful, in other days might have let you take the black." He spoke in the Common Tongue, and Harra knew enough of it to make out.

The unclean girl took two anxious steps toward Rickon and tugged on his leg. He leaned down and she whispered something in his ear, too quietly for Harra to make out. He nodded, looking almost concerned.

"Princess Shireen says that cutting throats is not chivalrous. My father did not cut throats neither," Rickon said after rising up again, and turned to the Onion Knight, "Ser Onion, would you swing the sword?" He did love his childish names for people.

He regard his liege thoughtfully for a moment, head bent down slightly in wariness and even a little fear. His pinkish and weathered skin went paler. Harra thought that his world must feel upside down, when children preside over the execution of grown adults, royalty or not.

The Onion Knight and said, "I would. But my with one hand missing its fingers, I could not swing hard enough to kill the man in one blow."

The Magnar stepped out from the crowd, man taller than Harra but with the same warm brown skin and almond shaped eyes, holding an iron greatsword over his shoulder, likely pillaged. He spoke in the Old Tongue, "I would do the deed in the stead of the King of Winter. Only my cousin Yor can lift more stones than me. This sword is no good in battle. Let it put this traitor to death."

Shireen, by this time had turned her face away from the captive, her fingers digging into Rickon's leg. She didn't want to be here, but she didn't want to be afraid his side even more.

"Do it, Magnar," the Onion Knight said called for a block of stone.

Harra and another warrior took the man by the shoulders shoved him down on the block.

The captive never said another word before the dull iron was raised up above his head, almost disappearing into the grey of the sky before it was brought down in a heavy whoosh and the sick sound of splitting flesh.

A red brook flowed out and spilled on the roots of the heart tree.

Osha cried for the stores to be raided and for the firewood to be gathered; the feasting would begin soon. The savage little wolf took away his fancied princess on his black-furred mount, to spare her the ghastly sight of it.


End file.
